I agree. One can show a clip gain line automation, which is great... but I often just want to change the overall gain of a particular clip and it would be a much nicer solution to simply always have an overall clip gain number that can be changed by selecting it with the mouse or double clicking and entering a value.

Just a tip I'll throw out there, with the Smart Tool use CTRL+Left-Click on the bottom of a clip and drag up or down to change clip gain without changing the Edit Filter.

I also would like this, because I would like to visually see the peaks in a clip, then be able to visually tame those, so that I could hopefully get better response from a compressor. I would like to take this one step further by being able to have a true wave editor within sonar, so that I can do my work in one program and not have to export, import, rinse, repeat.

yes please

Agreed - nice suggestion.